Final 12 months, New York’s Frick Assortment loaned three work by Johannes Vermeer to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for a particular exhibition. The ensuing blockbuster, which become the Dutch museum’s most profitable present ever, attracted round 650,000 guests from 113 international locations. Now the Rijksmuseum is returning the favour and lending one in every of its personal Vermeers to the Frick for an exhibition celebrating the New York museum’s reopening after a yearslong development challenge.
The landmark Vermeer exhibition on the Rijksmuseum, which noticed the unprecedented gathering of 28 work by the Dutch Golden Age artist, had its origins in New York in 2018, when the Frick introduced plans to close its Manhattan premises for a serious renovation. The multiyear closure freed up the Frick to mortgage its three Vermeers for the primary time for the reason that museum’s namesake, the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, acquired them greater than 100 years in the past. This, in flip, impressed the Rijksmuseum—proprietor of 4 Vermeers, together with The Love Letter (round 1669-70) and The Milkmaid (round 1660)—to get busy making inquiries concerning the world’s 30-odd remaining ones.
Now, because the Frick prepares to reopen its revamped advanced, the Rijksmuseum is sending over greetings within the type of The Love Letter, which the Frick will use as a centrepiece in its personal bijou Vermeer present, Vermeer’s Love Letters (18 June-8 September), a three-work set up inaugurating the Frick’s new special-exhibition galleries. Along with the Dutch museum’s Vermeer—a beguiling, mysterious inside scene that includes a lady taking part in a lute, her maid and a letter—the present will embrace the Frick’s personal Mistress and Maid (round 1666-67) and, on mortgage from the Nationwide Gallery of Eire, Woman Writing a Letter, together with her Maid (round 1670).
Johannes Vermeer’s The Love Letter (round 1669-70) Courtesy the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Curated by the College of Amsterdam’s Robert Fucci, Vermeer’s Love Letters will give every work its personal wall, says the Frick’s director Ian Wardropper. And although the present is to be held in a brand new house—transformed out of a first-floor room beforehand used for live shows and lectures—its diminutive guidelines may be very a lot consistent with the Frick’s longstanding minimalist method.
“I imagine in small exhibits,” Wardropper tells The Artwork Newspaper, including {that a} very tight focus is “what the Frick does rather well”.
The brand new galleries, comprised of three in another way sized rooms unfold out over 2,000 sq. ft, are a signature characteristic of the Frick’s renovation, designed by New York’s Selldorf Architects. Beforehand, the museum had mounted short-term exhibits in two small subterranean seminar rooms (with ceiling heights ill-suited for work) or on the primary ground in areas created by displacing works from the everlasting assortment. The reimagining of a once-circular room, which dated to the Beaux Artwork mansion’s preliminary conversion right into a museum within the Nineteen Thirties, “is referential and deferential to the outdated home”, says the architect Annabelle Selldorf, recognized for her conversion of one other Fifth Avenue mansion into the Neue Galerie, a museum of German and Austrian artwork.
All three of the works on view in Vermeer’s Love Letters had been within the 2023 Rijksmuseum present, however not in the identical house. This enables for contemporary comparisons within the Frick’s exhibition, says Wardropper. And although the brand new galleries had been “intentionally stored small”, he says, they may have room to spare throughout this miniscule summer season present.
The Vermeers can be displayed within the largest of the three rooms, and the smallest can be used for introductory panels. That leaves the third, medium-size room. “We are going to use that to retailer the crates that the Vermeers got here in,” Wardropper says.
The reopening of the Frick subsequent spring coincides with the winding-down of Wardropper’s 14-year tenure as director. He can be succeeded by the German artwork historian Axel Rüger—a former long-time director of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and, because it occurs, a Vermeer scholar himself.
